John Haydon

How To Create Successful Chats on Twitter with Hashtags (video)

Communities do not just happen. And they certainly don’t happen over night. You have to have something important to talk about. And you have to be prepared to consistently connect people together over a period of months.

What the hash?!

But Twitter is a big mess isn’t it? With thousands of tweets going off every hour, about hundreds of different topics, how do you build a cohesive group of fans?

Most people know that hashtags are ways to filter out the noise around specific discussions, like tuning into specific radio frequencies on Twitter. But not everyone knows how to create successful chat sessions.

In this video, I outline the basics of managing a hashtag chat on Twitter:

* How to use TweetGrid.com (one tool among many valuable tools)
* How to create a hashtag
* How to avoid missing replies to you within a chat
* How to find and invite others to your chat
* The importance of a landing page for your chat

Comments

There seems to be some great potential to grow a community with these chats… but I’m assuming I’d want to start almost every message with an @Reply so my followers who don’t participate aren’t inundated with dozens of tweets. Is that right?

I would argue that #hashtags are part of the answer. So are ‘lists’, geo-localization (@ChrisBrogan calls this geopocketing and it looks like Twitter is headed in this direction), saved searches and some fancy Twitter Search RSS feed tricks (advanced).

If you’re tracking a brand or industry closely you can use FeedMyInbox.com to feed a Twitter search feed into your email. That when people tweet about ABC widgets, you get an aggregate email about it. Or you can add it to your Google Reader or Homepage if that’s more comfortable for you.